Tag Archives: Gary Warne

The Suicide Club was the organization that Cacophony morphed out of some years after the Clubs demise in 1982. Begun in February 1977 and growing out of former S.F. State University “free school” Communiversity (that went rouge breaking free of institutional restrictions and forming a non-profit school) Communiversity birthed the Suicide Club as a “class” in it’s Winter 1977 calendar of free classes. The Suicide Club became known for bridge climbing and other urban infra-structure exploration, Infiltrating cults like the Moonies, street theater (naked cable car stunt, etc.) and live action games on city streets among other types of events.

One of the many endeavors of Gary Warne during his short life was an early “weird film” series that he co-hosted with Ron Sol called The Fantasy Film Festival. Each week at Gary’s bookstore on Judah St., you could settle into a giant pile of pillows and futons and watch a double bill of movies that were guaranteed to keep your interest. Perhaps the hi-light of the series took place at the Roxie Cinema in late 1978 when Gary showed the (long forgotten and virtually unknown at that time) “Dr. Suess’ Five Thousand Fingers of Doctor T.” The second movie on the bill remains one of the very strangest I have ever seen: the Italian made “Catch as Catch Can. This film starred Vittorio Gasman as a fastidious, dirt loathing TV star who is incessantly attacked by any and all animals (bulls, pigeons, insects) that he happens to run into.

Suicide Club food fight “before” – photo by GregMancuso

Communiversity Summer 79

This parody of hippy dippy new agefree schools such as “Lifeschool” (real non-profit school in SF in the70’s) and Marin County sensibilities in general went out with the classcalendar mailer for OUR hippy dippy new age free school, Communiversity.

The history of the most influential underground cabal you’ve never heard of

Rising from the ashes of the mysterious and legendary Suicide Club, the Cacophony Society, at its zenith, hosted chapters in over a dozen major cities, and influenced much of what was once called the underground.
The Cacophony Society’s epic exploits radically changed the way people live and play in the world.
The group inspired Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Burning Man and helped start pop culture trends including flash mobs, urban exploration, and culture jamming.
A large-format, full-color, hardbound homage to this protean group, Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society is packed with original art, never before published photographs, original documents and incredulous news accounts.
“Before the Internet vomited headlines by the millisecond and turned the minutia of a million boring Facebook lives into news, we were left the privilege of mystery.
This was something The San Francisco Cacophony Society gave me in spades. Over the years, I would catch glimpses, collect pieces of a puzzle I was slowly assembling—a car crushed flat by an earthquake miraculously tooling down Golden Gate, toasters glued to buildings, news-clips of mock protests and costumed impostors, flyers for strange art spectacles.
Now the puzzle is assembled in this gorgeous graphic collection, a book every lover of eccentricity and enemy of the status quo should enjoy.” – Margaret Cho